Collective Intelligence: It´s All in the Numbers

AI has been an exporter of ideas to computing in general (neural networks, agents, though robotics is more complex). But AI is now embracing ideas from elsewhere that were initially scorned because they were thought to have nothing to do with modeling intelligence and, especially, human intelligence. These are the statistical and probabilistic approaches to information capture and use that have become particularly prominent in machine learning but have spread all over AI in the last two decades. Pattern recognition was accepted in particular areas, like machine vision, as a kind of technological fix. But statistical and probabilistic approaches are now mainstream